Determining whether you work with reliable SEO professionals can be quite tricky. In their sales attempts, SEO professionals may guarantee quick results and top positions. It is important to know whether they can really deliver the promised results. You should also make sure that these SEO firms are employing ethical SEO practices. With enough careful consideration and proper research, you will be confident in the final result of your choices. One question that you need to ask is whether the SEO firm is able to guarantee a top position. In reality, you should be careful when the SEO firm is guaranteeing you this, because it takes so much effort to reach top position and there’s no guarantee that top position can be achieved despite your best efforts.
You may consider the SEO firm as honest and reliable if they perform research first and then provide best estimate, instead of simple guarantees. It is also important that SEO firms are able to deliver proven results from previous SEO projects. If these SEO professionals are worth their track, they should have proper track record and they are able to show things that they have achieved in the past. It is even better if these professionals have been working with similar keyword with yours or at least anything related. When these professionals show their track records, check whether they succeeded with easy keyphrases, which are essentially obscure long tail keywords that have low competition. It is better if these professionals have been successful with shorter keyphrases with more intense competition level.
As an example, long tail keywords like “car seller in northern Boston who also offers hot chocolate for free” maybe a bit obscure. It’s relatively easy to rank high for a combination of car seller, northern Boston and free hot chocolate. It will be much better if the SEO professional was able to rank high for “Boston car seller” or “car seller in Boston”. Competing for “car seller” will be prohibitively expensive and very time consuming, but adding a single geographical keyword should give you an adequate compromise. Another thing to ask is whether the SEO professional has an office. In many cases, a SEO firm is actually a single-person operation who isn’t able to handle intensive SEO tasks even for a few clients.
You may say specific things in a more private manner to the SEO professional whether he has any secret black hat technology that he will apply. If the person confirms that then this can be a big warning sign that we need to avoid. Black hat techniques will always be frowned upon by Google and we can be de-indexed immediately, if we violate any of the common rule. White hat techniques could be significantly slower in providing results, but we will get long lasting results. Black hat techniques are designed to cut corners and there could be bad implications that will happen in the future. Another thing to check whether the website of the SEO firm itself ranks well for SEO services in specific regional area or industry type.